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The Persistence of Memory and Other Stories
A dozen stories featuring characters from four to ninety-four, each dealing in some way with how and why our memories shape our current crises. Included in the collection: in the days just after World War II, a young girl tries to remember the man being introduced to her as her father; an academic denied tenure remembers how to land on her feet; a couple on their way to divorce think about the things that once drew them together and then drove them apart; an elderly man struggles to recall where the bathroom is and why his wife has been replaced by a stranger; a newly widowed grandmother remembers the joy of finger painting and answering to no one; and the title story, in which a great-grandmother proves that you never forget how to make a bicycle go even if you may need a crash course in how to stop one.
126 pages, Paperback
Published February 19, 2020
3 people are currently reading
17 people want to read
About the author
Jan Maher
13 books17 followers
Jan C. Maher
(b. 1946) is an American writer and educational consultant. She has written numerous plays and books including Most Dangerous Women (2006, 2015, 2017) and two novels, Heaven, Indiana (2000) and Earth As It Is (2017). She is a featured contributor in the fiction anthology A Contract of Words, and has several short stories and poems in online and print journals including Meat for Tea: The Valley Review and Straw Dog Poetry Anthology: Compass Roads: A dispatch from Paradise/Poems about the Pioneer Valley .
Her first collection of short stories, The Persistence of Memory and Other Stories, will be released on Feb. 19, 2020.
She attended Shimer College, and earned degrees from The New School, Millersville University of Pennsylvania, and The Union Institute and University. She is co-founder and director of Local Access, a non-profit organization whose mission is to create educational opportunities in and through the arts, and is a senior scholar at the Institute for Ethics in Public Life, State University of New York at Plattsburgh.
She lives in Greenfield, MA.
Her first collection of short stories, The Persistence of Memory and Other Stories, will be released on Feb. 19, 2020.
She attended Shimer College, and earned degrees from The New School, Millersville University of Pennsylvania, and The Union Institute and University. She is co-founder and director of Local Access, a non-profit organization whose mission is to create educational opportunities in and through the arts, and is a senior scholar at the Institute for Ethics in Public Life, State University of New York at Plattsburgh.
She lives in Greenfield, MA.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 19, 2020
The title story in this masterful collection depicts an elderly woman’s response to the confiscation of her driver’s license by her worried son. Marie decides that her father was right: You never forget how to ride a bicycle. She balances, moves forward, no problem. It is as if the decades of non-riding never happened. But she is unfamiliar with the braking system on her great-granddaughter’s bicycle; she remembers when stopping was achieved by pedaling backward, and that doesn’t work now. She ends up taking a fall, and in a lesser story the woman might have broken her hip and learned a lesson about aging gracefully. She might have died. But here it is the son who concedes the fine point: “If you want to kill yourself go ahead”, he says, and returns her license.
The story is aptly named after Salvador Dali’s 1931 painting of melting or stretching clocks, representing, according to Dali, “the camembert of time”. Time can’t be pedaled backward and it isn’t tightly bound to memory; it is a shape-shifting thing subject to the elements and the imagination.
Thematic elements of time and memory are important in each of the stories in this collection. In “Livia’s Daddy Comes Home from the War”, a child resists the idea that a stranger is really the father she has forgotten. Time with him finally convinces her that she is his child, much as time without him had led her to the opposite conclusion. In “Turn, Turn, Turn,”, a man with dementia has a precise memory of “the clock that has been on the mantle since Jackie Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers.” Hurrying to the theater to see his daughter perform, a man in “Answering” talks back to his heart when it beats out of time. He has regular phone conversations with his heart, and also with his stomach and gall bladder. “Between his internal organs and his daughter”, he observes, he “never heard the end of all the things that were wrong with him.” But then something goes wrong at the theater and it turns out that he is one who can shift the narrative and change how things unfold.
Maher is masterful in the ways that she handles different points of view. The third-person POV brings us just as close to Yanka’s feelings in “A Real Prince” as to the unnamed narrator in a story, “Ashes to Ashes”, written in first-person. Faithfulness to a child’s POV is beautifully maintained throughout “Livia’s Daddy Comes Home from the War”. This is an author who allows us to pause at the joining as well as the breaking points between memory and perspective, and make connections of our own.
The story is aptly named after Salvador Dali’s 1931 painting of melting or stretching clocks, representing, according to Dali, “the camembert of time”. Time can’t be pedaled backward and it isn’t tightly bound to memory; it is a shape-shifting thing subject to the elements and the imagination.
Thematic elements of time and memory are important in each of the stories in this collection. In “Livia’s Daddy Comes Home from the War”, a child resists the idea that a stranger is really the father she has forgotten. Time with him finally convinces her that she is his child, much as time without him had led her to the opposite conclusion. In “Turn, Turn, Turn,”, a man with dementia has a precise memory of “the clock that has been on the mantle since Jackie Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers.” Hurrying to the theater to see his daughter perform, a man in “Answering” talks back to his heart when it beats out of time. He has regular phone conversations with his heart, and also with his stomach and gall bladder. “Between his internal organs and his daughter”, he observes, he “never heard the end of all the things that were wrong with him.” But then something goes wrong at the theater and it turns out that he is one who can shift the narrative and change how things unfold.
Maher is masterful in the ways that she handles different points of view. The third-person POV brings us just as close to Yanka’s feelings in “A Real Prince” as to the unnamed narrator in a story, “Ashes to Ashes”, written in first-person. Faithfulness to a child’s POV is beautifully maintained throughout “Livia’s Daddy Comes Home from the War”. This is an author who allows us to pause at the joining as well as the breaking points between memory and perspective, and make connections of our own.
February 19, 2020
A daughter doesn’t recognize her father when he comes home from the war. A college professor struggles to survive after being laid off in the recession, takes a job at a pizza parlor, and deals with a would-be robber. A separated couple confront their past together while stuck in a darkened elevator. These vivid, intimate stories are pure pleasure, taking us quickly and deeply inside the lives of their characters. Many of the stories are about older people, some in facilities, and told with care, attention, humor, and love. An elderly man interacts with caretaker strangers in his home while his wife is being taken to the hospital. Another older man imagines that his internal organs are leaving him messages on his answering machine. A widow reviews her life and her children’s lives while staying with her daughter-in-law. In the title story, a nearly 100-year-old woman takes a wild ride on her great-granddaughter’s bicycle. Small stories, beautifully executed! A great read. Enjoy!
March 3, 2020
The Persistence of Memory and Other Stories, by Jan Maher, is a slim book that packs a wallop. It reminds me of a simple elegant meal that is served well, and linger for many months in memory, or a first date that goes well. You know you hit it off, and you’re pretty excited about seeing each other again. The stories are like that; deceptively simple, easily read, but like the sun on a warm day, they go far beyond a surface read. The characters stay with me; I revisit them as I go about my day, and wonder about what they are doing since they seem so alive. I wonder, What happened to Yanka, in the first story, A Real Prince? I began that story when the house was cold, early in the morning, just after I started a woodier, so I commiserated with Yanka from the get-go. Next, I wondered “Is that woman from the pizza Parlor going to be okay”? Each story is one to look forward to. Characters are well developed without using any extra words. Jan is an exquisite word and imagination artist.
February 24, 2020
Jan Maher's writing entices the reader in with a gentleness that eventually reveals its strength and range. Whatever the characters or their circumstances, the stories shine, told with truth and clarity and compassion. I'm happy to put these tales on my bookshelf next to her wonderful novels.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews